Posted by: Sumit Pandey

I am new to aurora and pulsar. I am really intrigued by the complexity of game. I was to contribute to development of pulsar. I have downloaded code and compiled it and got it running. What should be the starting point for development. Is there links to future plan and bugs/features?

Posted by: Nathan_

Is the project dead, or still in progress?Could you by any chance upload current version?

commits are still being made: https://github.com/Pulsar4xDevs/Pulsar4x.You'll have to compile the current version yourself however. There is nothing notable to release on the ECS side of things at the moment.

Posted by: Kulik

Posted by: se5a

still working on it. I hoped to have *something* to release by now, but things happened.Nathan and Shajenko are slowly learning other parts of the ecs and ui, so hopefully I'll not be the only dev with a big overall picture of how everything works.

Posted by: Kytuzian

>Lore-wise, the BFC is no longer like a normal tracking fire-control. It isn't "Point and Shoot" instead the BFC creates a quantum ion path between the firing ship and the enemy ship. Once this ion path is established, the ion path itself tracks the moving ship. When the Laser is fired, using hand-wavy TN mechanics, the beam travels along the quantum ion path to the target. Similar to lightning. Strong BFC's can create more larger and more powerful ion paths, and ECCM can stabilize the ion paths to be more coherent. ECM on the other hand, destabilizes the ion path and increases the likelihood of a miss.

Why was this mechanically necessary over lasers that just travel in a straight line and fire controls that try to predict the target's location?

Unrelatedly I'd love to hear about how development is going, is there a place I can do that?

If I had to guess, I'd say it's because it allows beam weapons to have a range greater than 5 light seconds.

Posted by: DPO

>Lore-wise, the BFC is no longer like a normal tracking fire-control. It isn't "Point and Shoot" instead the BFC creates a quantum ion path between the firing ship and the enemy ship. Once this ion path is established, the ion path itself tracks the moving ship. When the Laser is fired, using hand-wavy TN mechanics, the beam travels along the quantum ion path to the target. Similar to lightning. Strong BFC's can create more larger and more powerful ion paths, and ECCM can stabilize the ion paths to be more coherent. ECM on the other hand, destabilizes the ion path and increases the likelihood of a miss.

Why was this mechanically necessary over lasers that just travel in a straight line and fire controls that try to predict the target's location?

Unrelatedly I'd love to hear about how development is going, is there a place I can do that?

Posted by: Nyvis

I am not sure if its the best place to have a discussion on weapons (suggestion or new thread?). But for what it worth, eventually I'd like some thing along those lines. I think, that ideally its best to avoid rock paper scissors scheme (e.g. all lasers are short range). Instead offer some overlap, and encourage Races to specialize in a specific field, by offering advanced weaponry (e.g. Particle Lance) down the road.

Which would make scavenging and technology sharing that much more important. Although longer range "lasers" might be balance breaking, so some sort of reflective shield or armor coating (against specific frequency) could be used.

Agreed. I feel like this should be a thing. But to be fair, resolution mechanics in fire controls tend to do something similar already.

I am not sure if its the best place to have a discussion on weapons (suggestion or new thread?). But for what it worth, eventually I'd like some thing along those lines. I think, that ideally its best to avoid rock paper scissors scheme (e.g. all lasers are short range). Instead offer some overlap, and encourage Races to specialize in a specific field, by offering advanced weaponry (e.g. Particle Lance) down the road.

Which would make scavenging and technology sharing that much more important. Although longer range "lasers" might be balance breaking, so some sort of reflective shield or armor coating (against specific frequency) could be used.

We're not ready to diverge from the Trans-Newtonian ship movement and introduce acceleration/ship agility quite yet. se5a has stated interested in creating a "Newtonian Pulsar" after Pulsar4x 1.0

In a real military situation, analysts would realize that undirected, constant random movements would effectively dodge any unguided aimed shot against a ship with the size, speed, and acceleration of a Trans-Newtonian ship. If your computer is constantly making minor adjustments to course, you can easily dodge anything when we're talking about the speeds and accelerations involved. This is not an unrealistic situation under the universe's rules, and the only solution I see to counter this is to have either guided beam weapons, or faster-than-light ones. As i said before, I like my scfi to have a little hardness to it. If I have extra time I may introduce light-speed sensors and communications as well.

As of right now, there are no plans to introduce non-lightspeed beam weapons.

What about this bit of techno-babble that falls in line with pre-existing lore: Beam weapons fired upon ships of significant tracking distance away don't need to actually travel the whole distance physically? Specifically, it uses the same technology as jump engines to "jump" through the distance between the two vessels in much shorter time it takes to just span it directly. If we want to get less silly, we can say the space between the target and the shot is dilated to be much shorter, but only along the firing vector, whereas such distortion would be interrupted if anything of significant mass cuts through it (which is not a concern for shooting because of how fast projectiles are and how big space is).

Now how does this link to other auroraish or possible pulsar lore? Well, in the case of active sensors, really. We explicitly need an active sensor lock, and active sensors are heavily dependant on ship tonnage, correct? Perhaps we can justify our firing system as working by locking in on the gravity well to create a "lagrange point" in which the shot can exit.Because of how small these space dilating tunnels/jump tunnels are, any masses in excess of the very small ones of beam weapons (except for carronades, but carronades could do with working differently at some point...) would disrupt these pathways rather than be able to take them, but as mentioned before, the previous disruptions would be unaffected due to how little time the projectile spends in it. This will mean One Cannot Simply beam a massive point blank missile on someone's face.

At this point, finding a justification for misses is easy: The Beam Fire Control could be considered the exact component that creates these dilations/beam jumps. Missing would be considered an inability for it's internal tracking to accurately dilate space evenly or place the exiting jump "point" on an appropriate firing position.

Mechanically? Beam weapons would work exactly the same as they did in aurora, except without strict luminal restrictions. Maneuvering to cheese shots isn't an option (in the way it's mentioned in this thread), just going fast enough or being far enough to foil the tracking or range of the turret or the fire control (as going above tracking speed, or hanging out at the end of the BFC range means lower accuracy for the shooter). Beam weapons are treated as hitting their target the increment they're fired, or a second later at the very most.

Thoughts? Or is this just going too far?

I might just be an outlier that thinks that casually skirting luminal-speed limits isn't a huge issue for certain cases, as otherwise we'd have to address the silliness of flopping between systems almost instantly.

EDIT: Oh, and an explanation of damage dropoff for such weapons: we can say that a lot of the kintetic energy could "leak", optical precision degrades, etc due to the turbulent nature of such dilation of space and/or formation of unstable micro-jump points. A jump point could well enough knock out the sensors and shields on a ship, so i figure it could do quite a number on whatever you send through based on how far it's got to go. Thusly, range damage dropoff could just as well remain as well.

You might be looking at this a bit roughly, for an effect like that, we have two interpretations for that:1: A sweeping laser - ...You do know the game's combat takes place in 3D space, right? The 2D display isn't actually relaying that the fights between ships cannot vary along 3 axis, it just simplifies overall fleet movement on a large scale. A sweeping laser would suffer normal laser miss chances, and either has rather low damage output on a single pass of a ship or ludicrous power requirements. Just connecting with even two ships in a single shot would be an experiment of extreme difficulty on it's own. Hitting three or more can very well be considered impossible due to 3d formations that can be abstractly considered to exist.2: A "conic laser" -You mean... a flashlight? Inverse-Square law, remember. If it spreads out enough to illuminate an entire ship at the very least, (the very most smallest spread allotted), to do even a single point of damage depth you'd need damage equal to it's cross section, which is a huge amount of power, that is wasted due to a majority of it being spread out even further at any range beyond that.The best, closest thing to actually believably working in this sort of manner at the scale this combat takes place would be plasma carronades as you physically would look at them. And even then, the expectation for them isn't hitting multiple ships, but rather allowing very-near-misses to become grazing hits, essentially.

I wonder if cross section of a ship should affect the accuracy of weapons against them?

Posted by: Rod-Serling

mind you I'm kinda riffing on the concept of being able to turn out of the path of long range beam shots, though I'd think you'd need some kind of limit on how quickly a ship would respond to orders to change course, do it with crew quality, and perhaps ship agility causing a delay between order to turn and turn. that could be very interesting

We're not ready to diverge from the Trans-Newtonian ship movement and introduce acceleration/ship agility quite yet. se5a has stated interested in creating a "Newtonian Pulsar" after Pulsar4x 1.0

In a real military situation, analysts would realize that undirected, constant random movements would effectively dodge any unguided aimed shot against a ship with the size, speed, and acceleration of a Trans-Newtonian ship. If your computer is constantly making minor adjustments to course, you can easily dodge anything when we're talking about the speeds and accelerations involved. This is not an unrealistic situation under the universe's rules, and the only solution I see to counter this is to have either guided beam weapons, or faster-than-light ones. As i said before, I like my scfi to have a little hardness to it. If I have extra time I may introduce light-speed sensors and communications as well.

Posted by: Mor

My problem is once you start with the superluminal beam weapons it's only a short hop to the $&*(@#(% intergalactic laser nonsense in Force Awakens.

Which immediately takes you away from one of Auroras main advantages over pretty much all the rest of the 4x field.

Actually, Aurora Beam weapons range is due to 5s pulse technical limitation, not because its not using some "$&*(@#(% nonsense" like superluminal sensors tracking from across the system, instant command relay and laser sniping a ship as if it froze in position for 5 light second.. But such things are usually glazed over with *technobuble* as long as the system is solid.

I think that what @Rod-Serling was actually saying is that they are currently working on what is under the hood, like offering more precision and better time control system. And while such changes always require some re-balancing (just as it was with Newtonian Aurora), this is something that would be flashed out down the road by this community, so no need to jump to conclusions.